Snowstorm forces closure of Interstate 70 overnight

DENVER — The heavily traveled freeway from Denver east to Kansas reopened this morning after crews cleared away deep snow from a powerful storm that stranded dozens of motorists and caused at least three deaths in Colorado.

“Everything seems to be clearing out and conditions are improving rapidly,” said Mark Aultman, who monitors traffic from the Colorado Department of Transportation’s traffic operations center.

The storm dumped up to 20 inches of snow on the Eastern Plains and more in the mountains.

Westbound lanes of Interstate 70 — the main east-west route across the state — reopened about 6:30 a.m., triggering a mass exodus from truck stop parking lots, where truck drivers spent much of Monday.

Linda Samuel, manager at the Flying J Travel Plaza, said the trucks were slowly beginning to file out.

“They’re just trying to get ready to go,” Samuel said. “They’re not making any money sitting.”

More than 60 people took refuge in Red Cross shelters in the small towns of Strasburg, Byers and Bennett along I-70 while while the freeway was closed. Robert Wade, 21, was stuck in the snow for four hours after driving off the road in whiteout conditions while towing a 17-foot U-Haul trailer.

“The snow got ridiculous,” he said, later adding: “The U-Haul is pretty hard to handle. I’m used to driving a Toyota Camry. We thought we were in Siberia.”

Wade and other stranded motorists in shelters busied themselves with DVDs and games of Scrabble.

A 73-year-old former reporter for The Denver Post died after being struck by a falling tree limb while she swept snow outside her home Monday. Neighbors told the newspaper they had warned Virginia “Ginny” McKibben to go inside as they heard branches snapping around the neighborhood.

An unidentified man and a woman died after a van carrying 11 people went off Interstate 76 and collided with a guardrail about 20 miles northeast of Denver. The road was icy and slushy at the time and the accident is believed to be weather-related, Colorado State Patrol Trooper Eric Wynn said.

Ski resorts, eager to open for the year, reported up to 2 1/2 feet of snow in the mountains west of Denver. Byers, on the plains east of Denver, got 20 inches of the dense snow. The storm caused a gray, rainy day in Denver but dropped only a little more than three inches of snow on the city.

Many trees, still in full leaf, snapped under the weight of the snow and in some instances dropped onto power lines, leaving as many as 100,000 Xcel Energy customers without power at some point Monday and early Tuesday, said Mark Stutz, spokesman for the state’s largest utility.

By early today, 9,000 customers remained without electricity, he said.

Some 50 Xcel crews were working 16 hour days and hoped to restore power by midday Tuesday, Stutz said. Most of the outages were localized, affecting hundreds of customers in neighborhoods and in some instances, single homes.

Dozens of schools in eastern Colorado and the Denver Metro area were closed Tuesday because of the storm or power outages.

By late Monday, service at Denver International Airport was returning to normal after flights were delayed as hundreds of planes lined up for de-icing, said spokesman Steve Snyder.





Summit Daily News, Summit County, Colorado